Elizabeth Davies: Mom duties in the driver’s seat

Friday

Jul 30, 2010 at 12:01 AMJul 30, 2010 at 8:13 PM

When you live 10 miles to the nearest town, plenty of your parenting is done in the car. On any given day, you might catch me tooling down the highway doing a rundown of the ABCs, singing the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or — during summer construction season — offering my vast knowledge of the inner workings of skidsteers and forklifts.

Elizabeth Davies

When you live 10 miles to the nearest town, plenty of your parenting is done in the car.

On any given day, you might catch me tooling down the highway doing a rundown of the ABCs, singing the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or — during summer construction season — offering my vast knowledge of the inner workings of skidsteers and forklifts.

Like many moms, I’ve become a front-seat parent. If I tilt my rearview mirror just-so, I can catch half the face of each of my children in the backseat (and very little of the road behind me, to offer a word of warning to any other cars on the road).

In the car, we’ve learned that red means stop and green means go. We examine fire engines when they pull up alongside us at lights. We’ve counted train cars, spelled out a stop sign and pointed out the colors in the American flag.

As my kids get older, I wonder how much of my parenting will continue to happen in the car. Will we talk about bullying on the way to school? Will my words help to mend a broken heart on the way home from a date gone bad? Will I guide them toward a good college, the right career, a precious spouse?

I fear that I’ll someday be tuned out by iPods and cell phones, that my words will be greeted with the “click, click” of someone dashing off a text to a friend.

But I hope that I will find the time, between the sleepovers and the football games, to teach my kids the lessons I really want them to learn. It’s all fine and good to count railroad cars, but some of the other things they need to know can’t be worked into a catchy song or a whimsical game.

Not long ago, my 3-year-old watched in awe as a construction truck wheeled in front of us. “I like dat,” he told me. “I will ride it when I a man.”

I grinned, and tucked that phrase away in my heart — “when I a man.” What he doesn’t know yet is that becoming a man doesn’t automatically come with age. It comes with wisdom, maturity and the confidence to do the right thing even when no one else does. There are plenty of politicians, doctors, lawyers and CEOs out there who have yet to become men.

But how does a mother teach that from the front seat of her car?

Someday, my little boy, when we’re past counting and colors and spelling, there are a few other lessons I want to share with you:

If you’re going to do something, do it well. And those things that come easy to you? That’s your chance to be great.

Take your life and really live it. I did not endure nine months of heartburn and 14 hours of labor so you could “veg out.”

Failing with your head held high is better than succeeding by sheer luck.

Unsolicited advice is nothing more than a suggestion — unless it comes from your mother,
because she really knows what she’s talking about.

Dream big, take risks and do more than you ever thought possible. Show the world what true character looks like.